[sclug] Wood vs GHC

[Bob Dunlop]

Hi,

On Thu, May 16 at 01:43, Neil Haughton wrote:
...
> > If you're lucky enough to have GCH then monitoring the amount of fuel
> > burnt would be awesome and linking the pi to monitor a carbon monoxide
> > detector would also be highly desirable (is the former even possible?).
...
> > With a wood buring stove you can at least see your money going up in
> flames. With GCH it's all done behind closed doors, so the first you know
> of it is when the baillifs come to take away your furniture. GCH is not all
> roses, you know!

Oh for GCH, how I'd like that.

Try burning oil to heat your home, now that hurts.

Back to Pi's and heating projects.  Once you add a computer into the
equation there is a lot more interesting things you can do even inside
the realms of what might be considered sane.

If I ever get my grandiose schemes off the ground I'd like to link various
other inputs to my system.  A lot would be about attempting to predict
future conditions to avoid running the heating unnecessarily.  So for
example if the output from my solar PV system has been high for the day,
I can predict that the living areas of the house will have benifited from
a good level of passive solar heating, since this means I'm unlikely to
need to run the central heating for room heating I would be better to
provide the hot water demand by running the immersion heater than the
boiler.  If I can predict this early enough I could run the immersion
early in the day while the PV is generating.

Or even simpler, try to avoid running the boiler when there's a North
wind as it makes the kitchen stink of oil.

I have PV panel, power monitoring and a weather station already logging
to my computer.  What I need now are a few temperature monitors and the
output controls to the heating.


Another idea about predicting the future would be to scrape weather
reports from the web and use these to modify your heatings behaviour.

-- 
        Bob Dunlop